Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason

I have been really good about not going out and buying books lately, but when Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason (2002) by Jessica Warner was listed in my favorite discount book catalog from which I just happened to be buying legitimate Christmas gifts, I couldn't say no. Basically if you have debauchery in your subtitle, I am in.

In this book Warner gives the reader a social and political history of the effects of gin on English culture in the mid-1700s -- primarily as it was legislated through the Gin Acts of 1729 through 1751. Although distilled liquor (or "strong water") had been around since the fifteenth century, it wasn't until the 1700s that methods of cheaply distilling liquor from local grains came to England. Before that the poor drank beer and ale, and plenty of it (Warner quotes the national average at 30 gallons a year) -- hard liquor was mostly imported and mostly for the rich. That all changed when gin came to town at a time when wages were slightly higher than usual. The working poor made room in their bellies and budgets for plenty of gin (2 gallons per person per year, at its peak -- and they didn't drink less beer, they just added on the gin), and this made the upper classes a little nervous. Why can't the poor be happy with beer and gruel? Why do they have to want gin and imported coffee? [Just take a look at this side-by-side comparison of William Hogarth's "Gin Lane" and "Beer Street" prints and decide where you would rather live....] If they don't produce tons of healthy children, who will fight our wars? Single women are getting drunk and causing trouble! Aren't they getting kind of uppity? All these questions and more bounced around the halls of Parliament. To complicate matters, all that gin was heavily taxed by the government, and the government really really needed the tax money to pay for a series of long wars.

These conflicts resulted in a series of more and less stringent Gin Acts that hoped to both curb the amount of gin sold to the working poor (and the amount of unlicensed street hawkers selling that gin), and to increase the amount of tax money coming into government coffers. None of the legislation really worked though, and the primary result was more drinking with the added fun of occasional riots and mob justice for the informers who made their living testifying against unlicensed gin sellers.

The details of the various gin acts and their political motivations can get a little dull, and because of a real lack of documentation of the lives and thoughts of the poor in this time period the examples and narratives that Warner constructs are often repeated and frustratingly short on detail. Warner does a nice job of drawing on contemporary newspaper accounts and court records, and fleshes out the story as much as she can through biographies and memoirs written by politicians and authors of the era.

And I learned that no 18th century newspaper was complete without a pun-filled poem opining on the news of the day. Better journalism through poetry!

I'm moving to Beer Street. I'll see you jerks later.